'Aunt Mei', China's Most Wanted Trafficking Suspect, Is Finally Indicted

The woman known across China as "Aunt Mei" — the alleged accomplice in the country's most notorious child-trafficking case — will finally stand trial. On September 2, the Guangzhou municipal procuratorate formally indicted Xie Jiamei on trafficking charges, and the case has entered the trial stage at the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court. The news did not come from an official press conference but from one of the stolen children himself: Zhong Bin, abducted as a boy and recovered years later, posted a video explaining that the court had called him to say proceedings were moving, and that his lawyer should submit materials quickly. "I will respect the judicial process," he said, "and trust the court to judge it fairly."

Mei is not the prime defendant in the case that made her a national figure — those men have already been sentenced. She is the assistant who, prosecutors say, helped Zhang Weiping's ring steal at least nine children in Guangdong between 2003 and 2005, some snatched to order for families wanting a boy. Zhang was executed in 2023. Mei was never caught: her face exists only as a police sketch that circulated for years, her name and even her age unverified. One of the viral posts this week summed up the file: nine children confessed to being trafficked through her, co-defendants executed — and the woman herself still at large until now.

Her lawyer told Yangzi Evening Post that through reading the case file he has established her real age: around seventy, just under seventy-one. That detail matters more than gossip about an fugitive's birth year, because it sets the frame for the sentence. China's criminal law generally excludes offenders over seventy-five at trial from the death penalty unless their crimes used especially cruel means; a seventy-year-old defendant who trafficked nine children exceeds the aggravated threshold of three, so capital punishment remains on the table — a point legal commentators were parsing within hours of the indictment.

The story has broken well beyond Weibo: it is on the Baidu hot board ("Aunt Mei's age revealed for the first time") and Zhihu's front page is asking what answer the law can finally give. For the families in the case — several of whom spent nearly two decades searching, and whose reunifications became national news — the trial is the last unclosed file of the Zhang Weiping case. Whether the woman behind the sketch receives the maximum sentence, or is treated as a secondary figure, will be decided in a Guangzhou courtroom within months.